Coveted Souls
by Light Within Shadow
Summary: When Ed left for the west and Al for the east, they were hoping to discover new information on alchemy. What they didn't expect to find was a new conflict already rising up to meet them, or a force with the potential power to change Amestris forever.


**Disclaimer: I do not, in any way, shape, or form, own Fullmetal Alchemist, its characters, plotline, or... well anything really.**

Other than that though, this is the first FMA fanfic that I've done. I only recently discovered the series and instantly fell in love with it, so I wanted to write something for it. This story is the result. It's set post-Brotherhood, as you could probably tell from the summery.

Not much else to say so... Happy reading ^_^

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><p><em>Winry,<em>

_I'm not sure whether I should be sending this to you at home or to Rush Valley, but I'll probably end up trying Resembool. Hopefully, Granny will forward this to you if you're not there._

_I left Creta soon after I sent you the first letter, and I've spent most of the three months since then traveling around Kuni, a country the boarders the Peiquen Sea to the south. Their major industry is shipbuilding, so I was hoping that the resulting trade with other countries might mean a collection of ideas from different places. Turns out, most people there have never even heard of alchemy. _

_Most of their trading partners are from the southern land mass across the sea, and as far as I can tell, there isn't any form of alchemy practiced in that region. Honestly, the whole place really just turned out to be a giant waste of time._

_About two weeks ago though, I headed north up into a country called Volacia. It's about the same size as Amestris, boarders Drachma to the north and Creta to the east. The whole nation is completely rural. They've got the western edge of the Briggs mountain range in the north, and pretty much everything else lies in the foot hills south of there. At first, I was convinced this place was going to be exactly the same as Kuni. I think I may have been wrong about that now. _

_I found something here, and I'm bringing it back to Amestris._

_I'm going to try and get on a train headed back to Creta in the next few days. The whole trip from here to Resembool will probably take about a week and a half, assuming there aren't too many stops along the way, so I'm hoping to get back by the middle of September. Shoot Al a letter, if you know where to send it to, just so he knows what's going on. I haven't talked to him since the day we left. I gotta say, it gets kinda quiet not having him around._

_See you soon,_

_Ed_

For what must have been the fourth time that hour alone, Winry found her eyes skimming along the lines of the letter that now sat propped up against the wall on her work table. It looked slightly beat up, creased from being folded and unfolded so many times, worn from having been carried around stuffed into a pocket. The upper right corner of the page was slightly torn.

The young mechanic clasped her hands together on top of the wooden surface in front of her, resting her head on her intertwined fingers as she stared at the words written on the page, the automail arm she had been working on temporarily forgotten.

Edward's handwriting really did leave something to be desired, she thought dully, studying the young man's messy scrawl. He had gone back to writing with his right hand over the past couple years since he got it back, but it honestly hadn't helped all that much. His penmanship was still just as sloppy as ever.

Finally, Winry sighed, for a moment allowing all of her frustration and worry to show in that single sound. Then, determinedly, she sat up and grabbed the letter from where it was staring her down across the desk. Folding it back along the already well-defined creases, she then stuffed the now-small square of paper back into her pocket. Resolutely, she turned her attention back toward her current project, though her mind was still clearly elsewhere.

That letter had lived in her pocket ever since it had arrived in Resembool several days into September. At first, when she had received it, Winry had been slightly surprised. The "first letter", that Ed and sent her back in the middle of June, had also been the _last_ letter that he had sent to her, and the only time she had heard from him since he first set off for the west at the beginning of April. Not that that was really very unusual coming from him. What _really_ surprised her was the message at the end of the letter.

When Ed and Al had first set off in the spring to see the world and study different forms of alchemy, both had expected to be gone for at least a year. Winry had been expecting it too, had been ready for it, another long stretch of patiently waiting for both the boys to once again come back home.

So when she had first gotten the letter, not six months later, saying that Ed was on his way back, she had almost been unwilling to believe it. Nonetheless, whatever else could be said about him, Edward had always been good to his word. And so, the next day, Winry had sent out a letter to Xing.

Al, at least, kept up regular messages from where he was still studying Alkahestry in the east. Winry supposed part of it had to do with the fact that, for now at least, the younger of the two brothers was staying in one place, not constantly traveling as Ed had been. However, she was also aware that a much larger part of it more than likely stemmed from Al's far greater willingness to actually pick up a pen and write something.

Either way though, when Winry had written to tell him that his brother would, in fact, be returning to Resembool within the span of a few days, she had honestly found herself believing it.

But that had been three weeks ago.

Now, she honestly wasn't sure _when_ Edward would be coming back, or what had kept him from retuning half a month ago like he said he would. The letter had simply said that he had found something, that he was bringing it back home, presumably to study. It hadn't mentioned anything about some sort of international incident, or the discovery of some new kind of superhuman creature looking to become immortal or take over the world. So was it really possible that Ed had managed to stay out of trouble for the past six months, but then do something within the last three weeks that would keep him from being able to return to Amestris?

Winry knew the answer. Of course Edward would be capable of something like that, and to be honest, it would be just like him too. But she simply refused to believe it. _He'll be home soon,_ she kept telling herself. _Nothing happened._ Just like she had been for the past two weeks.

Absorbed as she was in her anxious thoughts, Winry was completely unprepared for the voice that suddenly came from behind her.

"If you spent half the energy working on that arm that you do worrying about that boy, it would be long finished by now."

Winry started, jumping about a foot off her stool at the sound. She whipped around to see a small, elderly woman calmly smoking her pipe behind her. "Granny!" she exclaimed, "How long-"

"Long enough to know you've been greasing the same joint for more than five minutes now," her grandmother calmly interrupted, taking the pipe out of her mouth to fix the girl with an even stare. "Why don't you go get started on dinner," the old woman suggested after a long moment, "I'll finish up with this. Maybe cooking will force you to go more than half an hour without taking that letter out of your pocket."

Winry blushed slightly, but slid down off the wooden stool nonetheless. She slowly rolled her neck, trying to work out the stiffness that had built up in it during the past three hours.

Over the last couple years, she had developed a routine of spending half her time serving her customers in Rush Valley, and the other half working out of her own house in Resembool. During the times that she was home, she was more often than not developing new designs for the automail that she created, always looking for ways to make it lighter, stronger, more resistant to rust and weathering. Generally, Mr. Garfiel was able to handle the day to day needs of her many regulars, and if a customer was in need of a whole new limb, she was often times able to construct and then send it without ever having to leave Resembool, just so long as she was given the proper measurements. But if there was ever any sort of emergency with a customer, she would almost always come to them.

She knew her clients were sometimes surprised at this, but for her, it wasn't anything different. She had done it for Ed years ago, when it seemed he had been in the habit of breaking his own arm every other month, and she did it for them now. It was just the way she worked.

But thinking of Ed had brought the heavy weight of worry back into her mind, and so, in an effort to distract herself from her own anxiety, she decided to fallow her grandmother's suggestion. Giving the old woman a small nod of thanks, Winry headed for the kitchen, wondering vaguely as she went what they even had to make dinner with at the moment.

Roast chicken, she eventually decided upon finding the frozen bird at the back of the freezer, would probably be the simplest thing. She moved around the kitchen in relative silence, pulling out ingredients and cooking utensils, filling the sink with warm water and then putting the chicken in to defrost. Eventually, Den came in to trail around at her heels. The dog was panting slightly, her black tail waving lazily back and forth and her metal foreleg clunking against the wooden floorboards with every other step.

It was about an hour later, after Winry had finished pealing several potatoes and had just pulled the chicken out of the sink, that the shrill ringing of the telephone chose to shatter the kitchen's quiet. Winry sighed, shaking the water off her dripping hands as she went over to pick it up. A couple years ago, that phone had hardly ever rang. Now, calls were almost a daily occurrence, nearly all of them being from her various automail clients or from Mr. Garfiel. Reaching the far side of the kitchen, she forced a smile onto her face before picking up.

"Rockbell Automail," she answered brightly, drying her free hand off on her thigh. Her attention not yet really focused on the call, she shot a quick glance up at the clock beside the kitchen door. She figured she'd have to get the chicken in the oven soon if she wanted dinner to be ready by six.

"Winry?" The extremely tired-sounding voice came over the phone line. Suddenly, every thought about the progress of the upcoming meal was pushed from Winry's mind. She stood there, in absolute shock, for a moment not even believing it. Her lips were slightly parted, her bright blue eyes wide.

"Ed!" she exclaimed, and the moment she said his name, she knew she was absolutely right. The call wasn't of great quality, the connection crackling slightly and the heavy background noise of many garbled voices making it so she had to press the phone to her ear to try and hear well enough. There was no mistaking the voice though; she would have recognized it anywhere.

"You're back in the country?" she asked.

"Yeah," Edward answered, and she could almost imagine him rubbing his face with one hand as he said it, trying to wake himself up. "I'm in West City now. The next train for Central leaves in fifteen minutes and I'm on it. I'll connect to East City from there. Then it's straight on home to Resembool." He tried sound enthusiastic as he said the last part, and Winry had to smile just a little at the effort, even if he was too exhausted to really pull it off. She'd have to remember to ask him later why he sounded so much like a zombie.

As for the moment, she settled on the slightly more pressing question buzzing at the forefront of her thoughts.

"So what happened Ed?" she questioned, twisting around to lean against the wall beside the phone. She switched the receiver to her other ear, her right hand now fiddling absently with the coiled phone cord. "You said you were going to be back two weeks ago. You didn't get into some kind of trouble, did you?" Winry's voice turned somewhat suspicious. She heard Ed heave a sigh.

"No," he told her "I got held up in Creta. I had a one-day layover there." Sounding clearly aggravated, he continued, "They still have a lot of civil unrest going on and while I was there, some riots broke out among the states in the south. They froze all the train stations; nothing could get in out of the country for a week. And then it was three more days until I could get a train to Amestris."

He sighed again.

"But you're back now," Winry reminded him, the thought bringing a smile to her own face.

"Yeah," Ed agreed, "I'll be home soon." Winry thought she could hear a hint of a smile in his voice as well.

"Do you know when exactly?" she asked him.

"Well," he started, and she knew he was thinking. "It would take about two and a half days to get from here to Resembool without any stops. But I've got a six-hour layover in central tonight. With any luck, I'll make it to East just in time to catch the eleven a.m. train to Resembool. That's usually a three-hour trip."

"So, by two on the fifth then?" Winry asked, adding up the times he had given her. It was almost five o'clock now. She turned to jot the time down on a pad of paper sitting on the counter, holding the phone between her ear and her shoulder.

"Like I said," Ed muttered, "that's counting on luck." Winry thought she could just make out the drawn-out whistle of a train in the background.

Edward quickly confirmed her suspicion.

"That's last call for boarding. I'll see you and Grans tomorrow." A bit of amusement entered his voice. "Have an apple pie waiting for me!"

Winry laughed as she heard the hint of his usual spirit breaking through the layers of fatigue. It would be good to have him back home again, she decided. It had been just a bit _too_ quiet around the house the past few months. She'd gotten used to having the brothers around in the two years leading up to their separate trips.

"You got it," she said, taking the phone back in her hand. "Now, don't you dare miss your train! I'll see you soon."

"Right," he told her.

And with that, the line disconnected.

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><p>And so, our story begins :) I apologize if this first chapter was a little slow, what with there not being much dialog and all, but I really just wanted to set the stage here. I guess you could think of this as something of a prologue. Hopefully, I'll be able to get the next chapter up fairly soon. Reviews are, of course, very much appreciated, and constructive criticism is great. Thanks for reading!<p> 


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